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First Love

Obama: Jane Doe With a Curious Voice
While he was living in New York after college, he writes in Dreams From My Father, Obama met a white woman whom he doesn't name with “dark hair and specks of green in her eyes.” Though it’s hard to comprehend and actually seems kind of annoying, her voice “sounded like a wind chime.” For a year the lovebirds saw each other mostly on weekends, and Obama eventually visited her family’s country home in an undisclosed woodland setting. The two started stressing over the interracial aspect of their relationship; the breaking point came when they argued loudly over an angry play by an African-American that Obama had taken her to see. The couple split. “We started to think about the future, and it pressed into our warm little world,” he writes. He also admits that “there are several black ladies out there who’ve broken my heart just as good,” but doesn’t elaborate on those women or what hanging ornaments, if any, their voices sounded like.

McCain: Mercedes-Driving Brazilian ModelShudder alert: McCain’s high-school clique was known, according to Robert Timberg's book John McCain: An American Odyssey, for doing “deliciously unimaginable things with women.” Let's just say that throughout his time in the Navy (and again during the dissolution of his marriage to Carol Schepp), McCain was known as something of a ladies’ man. On leave in 1957 in Rio de Janeiro , McCain met and fell for a Brazilian model whose real name is unknown. The two had a whirlwind romance with McCain spending nearly every moment of his eight-day leave with her and receiving cheers from his shipmates when she drove him up to his boat in her red Mercedes and kissed him good-bye. He flew directly back to Rio to spend time with her on his next leave and during Christmas, but the romance was cut short owing to the distance between them and their divergent career paths. He never saw her again after that year, but McCain still talks about her on the campaign trail today. In Faith of My Fathers he writes that the relationship “resides in my memory, embellished with age, of course, among the happier experiences of my life.”